The kernel has the ability to hide other users' processes from unprivileged users by mounting the `proc` filesystem with `hidepid=1` or `hidepid=2`. However, [http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2012-October/006859.html this is currently broken with systemd] because it requires a workaround for the kernel's lack of support for virtualizing the cgroup filesystem in a container.

+

The kernel has the ability to hide other users' processes from unprivileged users by mounting the {{ic|proc}} filesystem with {{ic|1=hidepid=1}} or {{ic|1=hidepid=2}}. However, [http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2012-October/006859.html this is currently broken with systemd] because it requires a workaround for the kernel's lack of support for virtualizing the cgroup filesystem in a container.

Concepts

It is possible to tighten the security so much as to make your system unusable. The trick is to secure it without overdoing it.

There are many other things that can be done to heighten the security, but the biggest threat is, and will always be, the user himself. When you think security, you have to think layers. When one layer is breached, another should stop the attack. But you can never make the system 100% secure unless you unplug the machine from all networks, lock it in a safe and never use it.

Be a little paranoid. It helps. And be suspicious. If anything sounds too good to be true, it probably is!

Passwords

Passwords are key to a secure linux system. They secure your user accounts, encrypted filesystems, and SSH/GPG keys. They are the main way a computer chooses to trust the person using it, so a big part of security is just about picking secure passwords and protecting them.

It is important that your passwords cannot be easily cracked or guessed from personal information. For this reason, do not to use a dictionary word or something like your dog's name. A password should be at least eight characters long, with a mix of upper and lower case letters. It should include at least one number and/or one special character. As expected, longer, more complex passwords are generally better.

Alternatively you can make a password using the first characters from every word in a sentence.
Take for instance “the girl is walking down the rainy street” could be translated to “t6!WdtR5”. This approach could make it easier to remember a password. Or, if you do not mind typing you could make it “The girl is walking down the rainy street.”

Maintaining passwords

Once you pick a strong password, be sure to keep it safe. Watch out for manipulation, shoulder surfing, and avoid reusing passwords so insecure servers cannot leak more information than necessary. Tools like pass, keepassx, and gnome-keyring can help manage large numbers of complex passwords. Lastpass is a service that stores encrypted passwords online for synchronization between devices, but requires that you trust both closed-source code and an external corporation.

As a rule, do not pick insecure passwords just because secure ones are harder to remember. Passwords are a balancing act. It is better to have an encrypted database of secure passwords, guarded behind a key and one strong master password, than it is to have many similar weak passwords. Writing passwords down is perhaps equally effective[1], avoiding potential vulnerabilities in software solutions while requiring physical security.

Partitions

The kernel now prevents security issues related to hardlinks and symlinks if the fs.protected_hardlinks and fs.protected_symlinks sysctl switches are enabled, so there is no longer a major security benefit from separating out world-writable directories.

Partitions containing world-writable directories can still be kept separate as a coarse way of limiting the damage from disk space exhaustion. However, filling a partition like /var or /tmp is enough to take down services. More flexible mechanisms for dealing with this concern exist (like quotas), and some filesystems include related features themselves (btrfs has quotas on subvolumes).

Mount options

Following the principle of least privilege, partitions should be mounted with the most restrictive mount options possible (without losing functionality).

Relevant mount options

nodev: Do not interpret character or block special devices on the file system.

nosuid: Do not allow set-user-identifier or set-group-identifier bits to take effect.

noexec: Do not allow direct execution of any binaries on the mounted filesystem.

[1] Note that some packages (building nvidia-dkmsAUR for example) may require exec on /var.

Filesystem permissions

The default filesystem permissions allow read access to almost everything and changing the permissions can hide valuable information from an attacker who gains access to a non-root account such as the http or nobody users.

For example:

# chmod 700 /boot /etc/{iptables,arptables}

The default Umask can be changed to improve security for newly created files. The NSA RHEL5 Security Guide suggests a umask of 077 for maximum security, which makes new files not readable by users other than the owner. To change this, see Umask#Setting the UMASK.

Disk encryption

Disk Encryption, preferably full disk encryption with a strong passphrase, is the only way to guard data against physical recovery. This provides complete security when the computer is turned off or the disks in question are unmounted.

Once the computer is powered on and the drive is mounted, however, its data becomes just as vulnerable as an unencrypted drive. It is therefore best practice to unmount data partitions as soon as they are no longer needed.

Certain programs, like TrueCrypt, allow the user to encrypt a single file as a virtual volume. This is a reasonable alternative to full disk encryption when only certain parts of the system need be secure. Hidden volumes create another layer of security, introducing plausible deniability for encrypted data.

User setup

After installation make a normal user for daily use. Do not use the root user for daily use.

Password hashes

Warning: SHA512 is designed as a fast hash function, not for password hashing. An attacker can brute force a SHA512 hashed password far faster than bcrypt or scrypt allow.

The default Arch hash sha512 is very strong and there is no need to change it. By default, passwords are hashed in /etc/shadow, readable only by root, and only user identifiers are stored in /etc/passwd, therefore, as long as the root user is secured, the file cannot be copied and cracked on an external system.

Lockout user after three failed login attempts

To further heighten the security it is possible to lockout a user after a specified number of failed login attempts. The user account can either be locked until the root user unlocks it, or automatically be unlocked after a set time.
To lockout a user for ten minutes after three failed login attempts you have to modify /etc/pam.d/system-login:

If you do not comment the second line every failed login attempt will be counted twice. That is all there is to it. If you feel adventurous, make three failed login attempts. Then you can see for yourself what happens. To unlock a user manually do:

# pam_tally --user --reset

If you want to permanently lockout a user after 3 failed login attempts remove the unlock_time part of the line. The user can then not login until root unlocks the account.

Restricting root

The root user is, by definition, the most powerful user on a system. Because of this, there are a number of ways to keep the power of the root user while limiting its ability to cause harm, or at least to make root user actions more traceable.

Use sudo instead of su

It keeps a log of which normal privilege user has run each privileged command.

The root user password need not be given out to each user who requires root access.

sudo prevents users from accidentally running commands as root that do not need root access, because a full root terminal is not created. This aligns with the principle of least privilege.

Individual programs may be enabled per user, instead of offering complete root access just to run one command). For example, to give the user alice access to a particular program:

# visudo

/etc/sudoers

alice ALL = NOPASSWD: /path/to/program

Or, individual commands can be allowed for all users. To mount Samba shares from a server as a regular user:

%users ALL=/sbin/mount.cifs,/sbin/umount.cifs

This allows all users who are members of the group users to run the commands /sbin/mount.cifs and /sbin/umount.cifs from any machine (ALL).

Tip: To use nano instead of vi with visudo,

/etc/sudoers

Defaults editor=/usr/bin/nano

Exporting # EDITOR=nano visudo is regarded as a severe security risk since everything can be used as an EDITOR.

Editing files using sudo

Using a text editor like vim as root is a security vulnerability as it allows one to execute arbitrary shell commands, and does not log the user who executed the commands. To solve this, add

EXPORT SUDO_EDITOR=rvim

to your shell's configuration file and use sudoedit filename or sudo -e filename to edit files. This will automatically edit filename with rvim, disabling shell commands from within your text editor.

Restricting root login

Once sudo is properly configured, full root access can be heavily restricted or denied without losing much usability.

Allow only certain users

The PAMpam_wheel.so lets you allow only users in the group wheel to login using su. Edit /etc/pam.d/su and uncomment the line:

# Uncomment the following line to require a user to be in the "wheel" group.
auth required pam_wheel.so use_uid

This means only users who are already able to run privileged commands may login as root.

Denying ssh login

Even if you do not wish to deny root login for local users, it is always good practice to deny root login via SSH. The purpose of this is to add an additional layer of security before a user can completely compromise your system remotely.

Mandatory access control

Mandatory access control (MAC) is a type of security policy that differs significantly from the discretionary access control (DAC) used by default in Arch and most Linux distributions. MAC essentially means that every action a program could perform that affects the system in any way is checked against a security ruleset. This ruleset, in contrast to DAC methods, cannot be modified by users. Using virtually any mandatory access control system will significantly improve the security of your computer, although there are differences in how it can be implemented.

Pathname MAC

Pathname-based access control is a simple form of access control that offers permissions based on the path of a given file. The downside to this style of access control is that permissions are not carried with files if they are moved about the system. On the positive side, pathname-based MAC can be implemented on a much wider range of filesystems, unlike labels-based alternatives.

AppArmor is a Canonical-maintained MAC implementation seen as an "easier" alternative to SELinux.

Tomoyo is another simple, easy-to-use system offering mandatory access control. It is designed to be both simple in usage and in implementation, requiring very few dependencies.

Role-based access control

The MAC implementation grsecurity supports is called role-based access control. RBAC associates roles with each user. Each role defines what operations can be performed on certain objects. Given a well-written collection of roles and operations your users will be restricted to perform only those tasks that you tell them they can do. The default "deny-all" ensures you that a user cannot perform an action you have not thought of.

Grsecurity RBAC dose not rely on extra meta-data like SELinux. RBAC is significantly faster then SELinux.

Labels MAC

Labels-based access control means the extended attributes of a file are used to govern its security permissions. While this system is arguably more flexible in its security offerings than pathname-based MAC, it only works on filesystems that support these extended attributes.

SELinux, based on a NSA project to improve Linux security, implements MAC completely separate from system users and roles. It offers an extremely robust multi-level MAC policy implementation that can easily maintain control of a system that grows and changes past its original configuration.

Access Control Lists

Access control lists (ACLs) are an alternative to attaching rules directly to the filesystem in some way. ACLs implement access control by checking program actions against a list of permitted behavior.

grsecurity implements ACL access control, as well as a complete kernel patchset focused on improving security. Its changes extend to control of memory allocation, improved chroot restrictions, and rules involving specific network behavior.

Kernel hardening

Restricting access to kernel logs

The kernel logs contain useful information for an attacker trying to exploit a kernel vulnerabilities, such as sensitive memory addresses. The kernel.dmesg_restrict flag was to forbid access to the logs without the CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability (which only processes running as root have by default).

/etc/sysctl.d/50-dmesg-restrict.conf

kernel.dmesg_restrict = 1

Restricting access to kernel pointers in the proc filesystem

Enabling kernel.kptr_restrict will hide kernel symbol addresses in /proc/kallsyms from regular users without CAP_SYSLOG, making it more difficult for kernel exploits to resolve addresses/symbols dynamically. This will not help that much on a pre-compiled Arch Linux kernel, since a determined attacker could just download the kernel package and get the symbols manually from there, but if you're compiling your own kernel, this can help mitigating local root exploits. This will break some perf commands when used by non-root users (but main perf features require root access anyway). See FS#34323 for more information.

/etc/sysctl.d/50-kptr-restrict.conf

kernel.kptr_restrict = 1

Keep BPF JIT compiler disabled

The Linux kernel includes the ability to compile BPF/Seccomp rule sets to native code as a performance optimization. The net.core.bpf_jit_enable flag should be left at 0 for a maximum level of security.

This can be helpful in specific domains, but is not usually useful. A JIT compiler opens up the possibility for an attacker to perform a heap spraying attack, where they fill the kernel's heap with malicious code. This code can then potentially be executed via another exploit, like an incorrect function pointer dereference.

ptrace scope

Arch enables the Yama LSM by default, providing a kernel.yama.ptrace_scope flag. This flag is enabled by default and prevents processes from performing a ptrace call on other processes outside of their scope without CAP_SYS_PTRACE. While many debugging tools require this for some of their functionality, it is a significant improvement in security. Without this feature, there is essentially no separation between processes running as the same user without applying extra layers like namespaces. The ability to attach a debugger to an existing process is a demonstration of this weakness.

Examples of broken functionality

Note: You can still execute these commands as root, such as allowing them through sudo for certain users, with or without a password.

See the commit message for when this feature was added for the rationale.

fs.protected_hardlinks = 1
fs.protected_symlinks = 1

Note: This is now enabled by default via /usr/lib/sysctl.d/50-default.conf

hidepid

The kernel has the ability to hide other users' processes from unprivileged users by mounting the proc filesystem with hidepid=1 or hidepid=2. However, this is currently broken with systemd because it requires a workaround for the kernel's lack of support for virtualizing the cgroup filesystem in a container.

grsecurity

The vanilla Linux kernel allows far more access to sensitive information then is needed and only provides minimal memory exploitation protections. Grsecurity aims to fix this. Grsecurity ships bundled with the PaX memory patches. PaX invented ALSR and provides far more protections then just that. Grsecurity hardens the file system, provides an advanced Role Based Access Control system and, and prevents information leaks which render PaX memory protections useless.

Physical security

Note: You can ignore this section if you just want to secure your computer against remote threats.

Physical access to a computer is root access given enough time and resources. However, a high practical level of security can be obtained by putting up enough barriers.

An attacker can gain full control of your computer on the next boot by simply attaching a malicious IEEE 1394 (FireWire), Thunderbolt or PCI Express device as they are given full memory access. There is little you can do from preventing this, or modification of the hardware itself - such as flashing malicious firmware onto a drive. However, the vast majority of attackers will not be this knowledgeable and determined.

#Disk encryption will prevent access to your data if the computer is stolen, but malicious firmware can be installed to obtain this data upon your next log in by a resourceful attacker.

Locking down BIOS

Adding a password to the BIOS prevents someone from booting into removable media, which is basically the same as having root access to your computer. You should make sure your drive is first in the boot order and disable the other drives from being bootable if you can.

Bootloaders

It is highly important to protect your bootloader. There is a magic kernel parameter called init=/bin/sh. This makes any user/login restrictions totally useless.

GRUB

Denying console login as root

Changing the configuration to disallow root to login from the console makes it harder for an intruder to gain access to the system. The intruder would have to guess both a user-name that exists on the system and that users password. When root is allowed to log in via the console, an intruder only needs to guess a password.
Blocking root login at the console is done by commenting out the tty lines in /etc/securetty.

/etc/securetty

#tty1

Repeat for any tty you wish to block.
To check the effect of this change, start by commenting out only one line and go to that particular console and try to login as root. You will be greeted by the message Login incorrect. Now that we are sure it works, go back and comment out the rest of the tty lines.

Note: If you see ttyS0 this is for a serial console. Similarly, on Xen virtualized systems hvc0 is for the administrator.

Automatic logout

If you are using Bash or Zsh, you can set TMOUT for an automatic logout from shells after a timeout.

For example, the following will automatically log out from virtual consoles (but not terminal emulators in X11):

If you really want EVERY Bash/Zsh prompt (even within X) to timeout, use:

$ export TMOUT="$(( 60*10 ))";

Note that this will not work if there is some command running in the shell (eg.: an SSH session or other shell without TMOUT support). But if you are using VC mostly for restarting frozen GDM/Xorg as root, then this is very usefull.